


H is for Holding On

by jdjunkie



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alphabet Soup Challenge, Angst, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post Episode: s05e21 Meridian, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 22:01:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1704095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdjunkie/pseuds/jdjunkie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel was gone.</p>
<p>Where did they go from here?</p>
            </blockquote>





	H is for Holding On

**Author's Note:**

> Brought to you by the letter H and the episode Meridian. Written for episode-related Alphabet Soup.

The blare of the heart monitor was insistent and unrelenting in the heavy silence.

Daniel had flat-lined. Then Daniel had died. Left. Something.

Fraiser switched off the machine with a click that was shocking in its finality, offering a blessed relief from the dreadful noise that accompanied the dreadful truth.

Stunned, bereft and disbelieving, those gathered did not speak. No feelings were shared, no grief expressed. No one, it seemed, knew what to say or what to do. There was no precedent for this.

Eventually, when the silence stretched too taut, they left the iso room, Teal’c first, pausing only to incline his head once more towards the now-empty bed, then Jacob and Hammond, then Fraiser, who placed a careful arm around Sam’s shoulder. Jack stayed the longest, standing perfectly still, hands shoved resolutely in his pockets. Finally, when some of Janet’s staff moved in hesitantly to start clearing up, he walked away, too.

Daniel was gone.

Where did they go from here?

>>>>> 

_” If you are to die, Daniel Jackson, I wish you to know that I believe that the fight against the Goa'uld will have lost one of its greatest warriors. And I will have lost one of my greatest friends”._

Teal’c opened his eyes slowly. Kel-no-reem was proving impossible. It had been many years, many deaths and tragedies, since he had found himself unable to achieve the peace that kel-no-reem afforded him. But this loss was harder than most to bear.

He reached for a lit candle, raised it to eye level in his cupped hands and stared deep into the flame.

What was he hoping to find there? Absolution for past wrongs? He knew he would never find it. The wrong he had done Sha’uri and Daniel Jackson was so egregious, so abhorrent, that there _was_ no absolution. He would never absolve himself of blame. And yet, over time, Daniel Jackson had forgiven him and come to regard Teal’c as a friend. A good man, he had once said. In the harsh, hard world Teal’c had inhabited before he joined the SGC, such forgiveness was unthinkable. His world was death and fear, a place where submission of will was all. There was no place for compassion, least of all toward himself.

Daniel Jackson had taught him much. Daniel Jackson had taught him what friendship meant. Teal’c was familiar with the ties that bound his warrior kin, but there had been no room for friendship with the comrades he called Brother.

For now, his thoughts turned to the best way to honor his friend, but it soon became apparent that clear thinking would be required to achieve that and his mind was too busy with the events of the day and the ghosts of the past.

He suspected he would come to know and understand more fully what he had learned from his teammate as he continued to fight the Goa’uld alongside the Tau’ri.

Teal’c stared into the wavering light of the candle for many more minutes, but calm and peace would not come.

He rose to his feet, crossed to his desk and ran his fingers over the Egyptian funerary statue that he’d hoped would offer Daniel Jackson comfort in his dying moments. He had no way of knowing if his friend had known he was there. He hoped so. Such comfort was all he’d been able to offer.

Teal’c’s quarters, so often his refuge, his place of comfort in a strange and often mystifying world, held no comfort for him at this moment.

He couldn’t be here right now; the room too small, his grief too great.

He picked up the statue and his BDU jacket and headed for the door.

>>>>> 

_“I may have, might have, grown to admire you a little, I think.”_

He didn’t like his office. He didn’t like what it represented. He was a practical man, a doer, a man who preferred combat boots and fatigues to shiny shoes and dress uniform. He did his bit by doing things. Hadn’t done much for Daniel, though. Unless you counted waving him cheerily on his way to who knew where.

Jack ambled around the room, eyeing with disdain the pile of reports that needed his urgent attention. He glanced at his citations on the wall, set alongside pictures of Forces buddies from different eras of his career. There he was, relaxed and smiling with an arm slung casually across Kawalsky’s shoulder, and with Michaels in a shot taken only days before the East German mission went to hell in 1982. Kawalsky and Michaels were gone and now Daniel was gone, too. All casualties of wars Jack had somehow managed to survive.

Lucky him.

He didn’t feel lucky. He felt angry, so damned angry he didn’t know what to with it. At least Kawalsky and Michaels had known what they’d signed up for. Daniel had signed up first and foremost to find his wife, and they all knew how well that had turned out. But he’d also signed up for the wonders of discovery and exploration, for the chance to learn and make things better. He didn’t kid himself it was entirely altruistic on Daniel’s part; Daniel was in it for Daniel, too, and there was nothing wrong with that.

But it was the altruism that had cost him his life.

Stupid, _stupid_ Daniel had put himself in harm’s way for bunch of lying Kelownan bastards. When Jack had pointed this out to him, during an early visit to the iso room where Daniel had eventually bled to death, Daniel had merely said, “Um, I was thinking about the Tau’ri and Jaffa bastards I’d arrived on the planet with, too, actually.” There was no arguing with that, so Jack hadn’t bothered. He kind of wished he hadn’t bothered with the mealy-mouthed acknowledgement of friendship that had accounted for the majority of their final conversation either.

Why couldn’t he have told Daniel that their friendship mattered? That he was a valuable member of his team? That his work had truly made a difference? Instead, he’d blathered on about admiration and official record, sounding for all the world like a CO rather than a friend.

As the minutes ticked by, he felt increasingly unhappy and unsettled. Nothing about what had happened felt right. And now, Daniel was gone.

Absently, he flipped open a file and just as quickly flipped it shut again. His office, this place that had never signified anything, seemed suddenly to signify everything. It felt overwhelmingly small and confining.

He had to get out of there.

>>>>> 

_“I don't know why we wait to tell people how we really feel. I guess I hoped that you always knew.”_

Sam sat at her bench, staring at the computer screen. The readout showed a representation of the energy pulse from the naquadria-enhanced device that had killed Daniel. She looked at it. _Really_ looked at it. This sort of thing was her lifeblood. She lived for discovery, for the gaining of knowledge.

She looked away but the image burned, searing itself into her memory. She forced herself to look again - this was what death looked like. Not a dry set of calculations, a graph, a series of numbers. This was blood, pain, tears and unbearable loss.

Daniel had died as a result of what could be something amazing and vital in their battle with Earth’s greatest enemy. Her need to find out more, to find solutions, advance human knowledge and capability warred with her need to grieve and rage. She had no idea how to deal with any of it. Her work was her refuge and solace. At that moment, because of what she was seeing on the screen, she hated that. How could she be thinking of work when she’d just lost one of her dearest friends?

Angrily, she swiped away yet more tears. It was okay to cry here. She was alone and wouldn’t be judged. She’d told Daniel once, as they considered the horror facing the young Cassandra, that she knew she was supposed to be detached, and he’d said, “Who said that?” like she should just ignore the military mindset that had been ingrained since childhood. Now, as she began grieving for Daniel, she realized that she had never grieved for her mother. She hadn’t been allowed to. She hadn’t allowed _herself_ to. She dug out a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose, loudly. _You hear that, Air Force? That is the sound of a woman grieving. Deal with it._ She blew it again, as a defiant addendum.

But even as she hated the military mindset sometimes, she recognized that it offered her the comfort of rules and disciplined reactions.

And, boy, she needed that comfort.

It had been barely two hours since Daniel had gone. How was it possible he was gone? Not Daniel. Not the beating heart of them. She loved him and she’d never told him. Not romantic love; something deeper and much more important to her. She loved him because he pushed her to be better. They weren’t competitive per se – their differing fields of expertise precluded that - but they poked and prodded each other to achieve, to beat the odds, to be the best, because that’s what they did and that’s what made SG-1 so damned good.

She’d tried, oh how she’d tried to heal him. Her father, too. And then the Colonel had told him to stop and he had. And no one had questioned it. Well, she had questions now and she needed answers. She was a scientist, just as Daniel had been, and she needed those answers for him, too.

Sam glanced one last time at the visual representation of Daniel’s death on her screen, and rose determinedly from her seat.

>>>>> 

_“Lightning flashes, sparks shower, in one blink of your eyes you have missed seeing.”_

Jack stood in the open doorway of Daniel’s lab. It hadn’t been a conscious decision to come here but somehow he wasn’t surprised that this was where he’d ended up. The team had often gravitated here - after briefings, before missions, after long, trying days when the coffee that Daniel always had brewing in his lab did nothing to ease the lingering tensions even as the talking and mutual bitching did. There was a myth that Daniel was a coffee snob and drank nothing else. He wasn’t a snob; he drank it whether it was hot and fresh or cold and stale. It was just the easy option and it was sociable. In the early days, being sociable had helped ease the way for a non-military geek type. Jack suspected Daniel liked the ritual associated with the making, pouring and drinking, too. What Daniel loved about ancient tea-making ceremonies, he subverted, in his inimitable Daniel style, with coffee.

Surfacing from memories, it came as no shock to Jack to find that he wasn’t alone here.

“You too, huh?” he said, quietly.

Teal’c was standing by Daniel’s desk, clutching some stone artefact, while Carter sat quietly, hands in her lap. She found a smile from somewhere. “Seemed the only place to be, Sir,” she said, voice thick with already shed tears. There’d be plenty more of those, Jack felt sure, and not all of them would come from her.

Jack stepped into the room, one step, two, and it felt familiar and comforting. The lab resonated with the echoes of past arguments, lively debates and laughter. With what it meant to be a team.

“Do you think he’s really dead?” Carter asked, turning eyes on him that seemed to plead for an answer they both knew he couldn’t give.

“Who knows?”

“There’s a chance that he could come back, right?”

“I don’t know, Carter.” It came out harsher than he intended, but he was all out of empathy for the day. “Try having a chat with Mother Nature.”

“Oma? What are you ...?”

“Forget it. Daniel’s gone. I suggest we all go home and get some sleep.” He was tired. Exhausted, actually. Maybe if he had some rest he’d be able to make sense of what had happened here today.

“But we can’t just ...”

“Yes, Carter, we can. We _will.”_

She stuck her chin out in that half-stubborn, half-hurt way she had but didn’t finish what she was trying to say. She didn’t challenge him further because she couldn’t. That had always been Daniel’s job.

Jack blew out a deep breath and shook his head. “Look. It’s been a hell of a day. We’ve all got questions,” he fixed Carter with a knowing look, “but now is not the time to ask them. We need to clear our heads. Report back at 08.00. We’ll take it from there.”

Teal’c bowed in acknowledgement, probably glad of an order to follow. Carter pursed her lips and dipped her head. Jack could see the questions practically fighting to cross her lips, but instead settled for a resigned, “Yes, Sir.”

Jack couldn’t offer them anything else. The best tactical option was to retreat and regroup. But Hammond’s earlier comment echoed in his head, _“Please, Colonel. Do not think you’re alone in your feelings on this matter.”_ He wasn’t alone. They’d all lost a friend and they needed more from him, even if it cost him to give it. If ever there was a time to be their CO, it was now.

“Teal’c ... that coffee drinkable?” Jack inclined his head in the direction of Daniel’s coffeemaker.

Teal’c put the statue down carefully and looked studiously at the pot. “It is doubtful.”

“Well, I could use a hit.”

Carter looked up at him, and for the first time since Daniel had gone, he saw a glimpse of the Carter he knew best - determined, stoic, dogged. “I’m on it, Sir.”

Holding onto the ritual meant holding onto Daniel. At least for a little while. After that, well, they’d deal with it together.

 

ends


End file.
